Saturday, August 28, 2010

QuickStart AdSense: A Step-By-Step Guide

You can be up and running with AdSense in just minutes. Sure, you’ll need a bit more time if you want to use all of the advanced strategies and techniques I discuss in the rest of this book, but you don’t have to wait until you’ve figured everything out before you can start earning with AdSense. Remember, every minute that your site isn’t showing online or isn’t showing ads, you’re tossing money down the drain.If you don’t have a site yet, or if you’re not showing ads on your site, before you move on to the rest of this book, follow one of these guides. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to start making money with ads!
AdSense QuickStart Guide #1: Building A Blog
Blogging is probably the easiest way to get online with AdSense fast. The sites are already online, you don’t have to worry about graphics and the domains are all set up. All you have to do is sign up, write and earn! Step 1: Surf to www.blogger.com Complete the registration page, choose a name for your blog and pick a template. Step 2: Apply For AdSense Through Blogger Another form, another five minutes. It will take a day or two before your application is approved. In the meantime, you can play with Blogger’s AdSense preview tool, and... Step 3: Write Your First Blog Entry Not sure what to write? Start with your family, spout off about a story in the news, put up pictures for your friends to see... it doesn’t matter. Everyone has something that occupies their mind, that interests them or that they’re good at. Put up anything. You can change it later but for now just get in the habit of writing to the Web. Once you’ve done it once you’ll see how easy it can be — and how addictive. Step 4: Play With Your Ads Once AdSense has approved your application, you’ll be able to start playing with your ads. You can change the colors, fix the font size, remove the border and move them into the sidebar if you wish. You can get everything geared up and ready to... Step 5: Bring In The Traffic It’s taken you minutes to get your site set up. Now you have to let people know you’re online. Chapter 20 will tell you how to bring in the traffic but for now you can start by telling your friends, swapping links with your favorite sites and submitting your site to the search engines. Hold off on the paid advertising though until you’ve got enough content to make it worthwhile. You’re rolling!AdSense QuickStart Guide #2: Building An Ad-Supported Commercial Site With Zlio.
Writing content is just one way to fill a site that will earn from advertising. Another is to display products for sale. That might sound hard but with a website, it’s very, very easy. You don’t have to see the products, store the products, touch the products or mail the products. All you have to do is market the products... and take a cut of the sales price. Usually, ads on commercial sites don’t work too well. You want people to buy from you, not from a competitor. When you use Zlio.com— an online store-building service — to build your site though, you don’t need to care who gives you the money... as long as someone does. Step 1. Sign Up And Choose Your Store Name Zlio’s registration page is very simple. The only thing you’ll need to consider is the name of the store. You might want to think about that for... maybe a minute. Just choose something that’s simple to remember and which sums up the products you plan to sell. Step 2. Pick A Template There’s no programming with Zlio. Pick one of eleven ready-built templates and you’re ready to go. Step 3. Add Products Zlio has over three million different products that you can add to your store and receive commissions on sales or even payment for clicks. I’m sure you can find something you want to sell... Step 4. Add AdSense In addition to placing units containing products for sale, you can also include AdSense units. And Zlio’s AdSense API makes it a breeze. You don’t even have to go back to the AdSense site to get the code. It’s all automated from Zlio’s own site. Step 5. Start Marketing Building the site is easy. It will take about five minutes. Bringing in customers will be a bigger challenge and take a little longer. But it’s nothing that can’t be overcome with some hard work and steady learning.AdSense QuickStart Guide #3: Building A Site From Scratch
Using an automated system like Blogger or Zlio is the easiest way to get started with AdSense but it’s not for everyone. Create a complete website from scratch is going to take a little longer... but not a lot longer. Step 1: Pick Up A Name The first thing you’ll need is a domain. You grab one of those at either GoDaddy.com or NetworkSolutions.com. Step 2: Build Your Site
You can build your site yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Or you can take a pre-built template and pack it with your own content. Yahoo! has a program called SiteBuilder (http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/index.php) that’s packed with a good range of templates that you can use and play with but you’ll have to upload the finished site onto their servers. If you’re in a rush, it’s a great way to get online and earning fast. Step 3: Create Your Content Keep it simple! You don’t have to pack your site with Flash images or anything fancy. Write about what you like! If you’re into fun at the beach, create pages with reviews of your local sand spots. Into skiing? Discuss your favorite ski equipment. Everyone’s got something that lights their fire. Find yours and put it on your first site. You’ll find that a site that interests you interests all the people like you... and gets you the sort of following that wins clicks. Step 4: Apply For AdSense Once your first pages are up and built (and none of this should take you more than a few hours) you’re ready to apply to AdSense. Fill in the form and wait for the approval. Step 5: Bring In The Traffic While you’re waiting for the first ads, you can start submitting your site to the search engines and building up the traffic. Step 6: Play With Your Ads When the ads come in, don’t forget to optimize them for your site. It’s very simple and will have a massive effect on your CTR, even at this early stage. And that’s all there is to it, apart from the final step... spending the money! I don’t think you need my help for that, do you?

Controlling Your Ads

Attracting Relevant Ads
Getting the color and placement right will help improve your click-through rate. But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves. In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash. The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money. The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page. Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.
6.2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant
How exactly the crawlers read pages is a secret guarded about as closely as Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have an effect though is the title of your URLs and files. When you create your pages and view them on your computer before uploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up ads related to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a pretty big clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name of the directory.
Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important. The name of the file plays a big part too. If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pages is trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the name of the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’ll see ads related to weddings. If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to do with your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title. Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you get better ads. Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a tag for your heading, try using the

336x280-1.html.
A great replacement for pesky PSAs, right? Just remember that Google doesn’t like it when publishers use ad units that mimic AdSense ads ON THE SAME PAGE as live AdSense ads. That’s why I only use this format for PSA replacement. But there are plenty of other options. For example, you could use this space to deliver image-based ads that come from your server. For offers that pay per action (clicks or signups), I like to use WebSponsors.com. You can signup for a free account and find new ways to monetize your unused ad space. Probably the best way to turn that wasted space into revenue though is to place a Chitika ad there. I talk about Chitika later in this book, in the chapter about other ad systems. The company has some fantastic looking ad units, and they can be used in conjunction with AdSense. Having a Chitika ad automatically replace a PSA ad is, I feel, the perfect solution until you manage to sort out the problem with your AdSense unit. The principle is the same as the AdSense-like ad units I used to use: create a blank page on your site, add your Chitika code and use the URL as your alternate AdSense URL It’s really very simple and very effective.
6.13 Blocking Ads
Another useful way to control the ads you see on your site is to block ads you don’t want. Google gives you a limit of 200 URLs to block, which isn’t much. You might well find yourself burning through them pretty fast, especially if you try to block lower paying ads in favor of the higher-paying ones. Playing with keywords, content and placement will give you much better results.
6.14 “Advertise On This Site”
Editor’s Note: Google has discontinued this service since the time of publication. Finally, there is one more way to influence the ads that you show on your site through AdSense: by placing a link inviting users to “Advertise on this site.” In the past, as long as you hadn’t opted out, the link would appear with your ads automatically. Now you have to add the link manually. AdSense’s Help Center explains how to do it, but it’s quite simple. You’ll just need to use this line of code, replacing “NUMBER” with your AdSense publisher ID number and “YOURSITE” with the name of your site: Advertise on this site Google even says that you can’t change the text. It has to say, “Advertise on this site.” Although that’s certainly more work than simply choosing to uncheck a box, as we used to be able to do, it does provide a lot more flexibility. You can now put the link anywhere. Publishers often expect to see these sorts of things at the bottom of the page. And what will happen when they click that link? They’ll be sent to a special landing page that invites them to sign up to AdWords and place their ads on your site. You’d be paid for those ads on a CPM basis. You can edit that landing page! Google sees this page as a co-brand: they host and supply it; you can do what you like with it. Advertisers that don’t yet have an AdWord account will be shown how to sign up and place their ads on your pages, and advertisers that do have an account will be shown how to advertise on your site. Google lets you make three kinds of changes to this page:
• You can add a logo;
• You can set the color scheme;
• And you can write your own welcome message.
Do you see why these options are so important? This is the only place in AdSense where publishers get to talk directly to advertisers. That’s crucial! AdSense is structured so that Google stands between the network of advertisers and the network of publishers. Ads go in one end, Google sorts them and sends them out the other end. Advertisers have no way of telling publishers to put their ads at the top of the page or next to relevant pictures or only on pages that contain positive reviews of their products, or anything else. Once they’ve submitted their ads, they just have to trust the publisher to promote their sites in the best way possible. Similarly, as publishers, we have no control over what the advertisers write in their ads. We can’t tell them to use particular keywords, to write certain things in their headlines or to produce their copy in a particular style. If we get an ad with bad copy, we just have to put up with the lower CTR until we either block it or see it replaced by a more profitable ad. Edit the landing page, and you can tell the advertisers what they should write to get the most clicks with an ad on your site. You can even include your email address and contact information and invite them to contact you directly.

You want that page to look like part of your site. If an advertiser has clicked on the “Advertise” link on your site, it’s because they’ve liked what they’ve seen. You’ve impressed them, not Google, not Google’s robot and not Google’s method of matching ads to publishers. Google understands that means they’ve got more chance of signing up an advertiser if they let you do the selling. You should certainly add your logo to this page. It appears in the top left-hand corner and makes the landing page look like you’ve endorsed it — which, of course, you have. If you don’t have a logo, this is a good time to create one. You could just use any graphic that appears on your site; the effect will still be to draw a link between the landing page and your site. And that’s the effect you want. You only get one landing page per account. If you have multiple sites, the ads will only appear on the site whose URL you inserted in the link, but you might not want to mention a site name on the landing page in case you confuse the advertiser. The color scheme, of course, should match the colors used on your site. It’s in the welcome text that things can really get interesting.You don’t really want to give advertisers a list of keywords that they should use. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be impressed by a bunch of demands from someone who has yet to earn them a dime. But they will appreciate information about the sorts of words that are likely to attract the most clicks. They’ll still feel that they’ve got the freedom to decide on their own ad copy — but they’ll be more likely to write the sort of copy you want. For example, if you have a site about cars and you know your users are particularly interested in models that suit families, you could let the advertisers know. If your blog mostly attracts Republicans you could suggest issues that are likely to get your users clicking an ad. If you’ve got a site about pets, you could point out that your users are more interested in accessories for dogs than for cats. No one knows your users better than you. This is the place to share that information so that you can share some higher revenues. And finally, you could also encourage advertisers to sign up for a targeted-site campaign. While it’s likely that most of the advertisers who click on the link will want to advertise exclusively on your site — and Google has set up the system to encourage that result — it’s also possible that some advertisers who are new to AdSense will decide to spread their ads over a number of different sites in your field. That means you’re only getting a fraction of their advertising budget. A targeted-site campaign will give you all of it. Just tell them that a targeted campaign on your site is likely to give them the best results. Does all that sound hard? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. You can just take the text below and adjust it for your site, swapping the underlined sections for details relevant to your site:See how easy that is? The page should be available within 24 hours, and once you’ve created it, you can put links to it anywhere you like; you’re not restricted to the little line under the ads. So you could put them in your emails and on your Web pages in places of your choice. Why would you send potential advertisers to Google’s advertising sign-up page instead of your own? Well, you might not want to. You might prefer to just vet each advertiser yourself and set your own price. But bear in mind that any advertiser who follows that link has to outbid other advertisers on Google who want that same space. You don’t know what exactly the current highest bid is; the most you can know is how many clicks your ads received and how much money you earned in the previous days and weeks. You certainly can’t tell how much you’re going to receive in the weeks to come. Sending potential advertisers to your Google sign-in page will ensure that you’re always getting the highest-paying ads for those spaces.
6.15 Does Location Matter For CPM Ads?
In a word, yes! This is what Google has to say about CPM ads, the type of ads you’re likely to get from a site-targeted campaign (my emphasis):So if you were thinking, “Great! I’ll encourage click-throughs above the fold and get paid per impression with an expanded text ad at the bottom of the page...” think again. Google claims that CPM campaigns have to bid for space on publishers’ websites in the same marketplace as CPC ads, and that therefore you would only receive a CPM ad if it’s the highest paying option. If advertisers are paying less for a CPM ad at the bottom of a page, it’s less likely then that you’re going to get one down there. Now, how Google is figuring out where on the page you’re putting your ads beats me. Their love of Smart Pricing (see Chapter 13) though, suggests that they could be comparing advertisers’ sales results with the number of impressions and assuming that sites with high impressions and low sales have put the ads in out-of-the-way places. Whichever method they’re using, the end result is that you’re still going to see higher revenues from ads in the best locations and less from the worst spots.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Using Colors To Increase Your Clicks

4.1 Design Your Website To Highlight Adsense
I once went to a fashion show where each model wore the exact same black outfit for the entire duration of the show. Boring? Hardly! The show was intended to showcase platinum jewelry, and the outfits were designed to enhance the jewelry — instead of distracting the audience. You don’t have to make all the pages on your website identical (or black). But you do want to make sure that the look of your page draws attention to the ads — and makes them appear as attractive and as valuable as platinum jewelry. Many websites have strong graphic elements that catch the eye — usually at the expense of the AdSense units.
4.2 Make The Border Go!
You can more than DOUBLE your click-throughs with this one simple tweak! Even before the Internet, ads in newspapers and magazines were marked off with a thick, heavy border. No wonder borders and boxes have come to symbolize advertising messages.
Ads with prominent borders make your pages look cluttered. They distract the eye from the ad text, while marking off the ad blocks from the rest of the content.
With just one simple click, you can match the color of your ad's border with the background color of your web page. When the border blends with the background, it frees up loads of space. The page looks instantly neater and the ads look more inviting. Make sure you also pick a matching background color for the ad. The ad's
background must match the page background on which the ad will appear. If the ad appears in a table, match the table background color with the ad background color.
The key is to blend the background and border color with the page, so that the text looks like an integral part of your web content.
4.3 Text Is Design Too!
That's right: the text size, font, color and the color of your ads must match the other text elements. If the text color of the ads is the same as the text in the body of your page, it’ll help the ads blend into the site and make the reader feel that you’ve endorsed them. And if the size of the font in the ads is the same as the size of the main body of the content, it will have the same effect: they’ll look like part of your site and not something brought in by Google.
4.4 Blue Is Best
So you want to get rid of the border. You want to get your ads the same color as the text on the rest of your page and the background matching the background color of your Web page. But what about the link itself, the line the user is actually going to click? What color should that be?
Copyright © 2008 Joel Comm and InfoMedia, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 51
That’s an easy one: blue. I used to say that all the text in the ad should match the text on your page, including the link. After seeing an article about the benefits of keeping the links blue — and testing extensively — I don’t say that any more. The logic is that users have come to expect links on websites to be blue. Just as they expect stop signs to be red and warning signs to be yellow, so they expect their links to blue. That means people are more likely to click on a blue link than a link in any other color. The line in your AdSense code that sets the color of your link is the one that says: Google_color_link = “#color”; “#color” is the hexadecimal number for the color you want to use. You should make sure that number is #0000FF. Keep your link blue and you can experience an increase in click-throughs as high as 25 percent!
4.5 Where Did My URL Go?
You can change the color of your text and you can make sure that your links scream, “I’m a FREE road to where you want to go!” But you still have to display the URL. It’s one of Google’s rules. But you don’t have to display it in a way that people can see it. One legitimate trick to make the click-through link less obtrusive is to change the URL display color to match the text description color. Now the link will blend in with the text description and the eye will be drawn to the hyperlink instead of the URL. Google provides these tools for you. Why not use them? Note that the 728 x 90 leaderboard and the 468 x 60 banner do not display the URL line by Google’s design. It is not a mistake and you will not get in trouble for the URL not appearing with these ad blocks. It’s just the way it is.
4.6 Deliberate Mismatching
When it comes to choosing colors, I recommend 3-way matching and using blue for the links. But there is another strategy that you can use. You can deliberately mismatch your ad colors and styles, provided you keep it to the top of your page. This distinction generates two powerful 'zones' and therefore two types of experience for the visitor. The first zone is always at the top of the first page, above the main site banner. The titles and text colors match colors found in the banner graphic heading. (Important — the URL links are hidden, so only certain text ads will allow you to do this.) The end result is that these ads, placed above the banner graphic look like key control points for your site and are just more likely to be clicked. The visitor feels that they are visiting another major area of that site.
4.7 Changing The Look Of Your Ads
The strategies I’ve provided in this chapter will all help to improve your clickthrough rates. That’s what happened when I used them and it’s what happened when other people used them. But one of the most important strategies you can use with AdSense is to experiment. If you find that a slightly larger ad format gives you better results, for example, then obviously, you should use the bigger one. In the past, changing your ads meant copying the code and pasting it into your site again. Today, things are a bit easier than that. When you create your ad code, you’ll be asked to give that code a name. Make sure that name tells you exactly where the ad will be placed and its format. Whenever you want to change the way an ad looks, you’ll be able to pull up that code on your AdSense center and make the changes. Your ad will be updated automatically within the next ten minutes. Unless you want to change the size of your ads. That you’ll still have to do manually by pasting in the new code.
5. How To Maximize Visibility And Response
5.1 Ad Placement: Where To Put Your Ads?
Location is everything. The world's best ad won't deliver if it isn't visible in the first place. But after much experimentation with Google AdSense, I know that the most visible ads aren't always the most effective. In fact, they're likely to get ignored as 'blatant advertising'. What does work is wise placement. Put them where your content is most
5.2 Go With The 'Flow'
Identify the reading patterns of your visitors. What draws their attention first? What makes them 'click'? Like I said, you want to put your ads in areas that draw your visitors in with interesting content. There’s no point in putting your ads in some out of the way place where no one ever looks. Your users will follow your content, so you need to make sure that your ads follow that content too. Look at the design and layout of your webpage, identify the places that you think most of your users look — and mark each of them as a likely spot to put your ads.
Google actually offers a pretty neat tool to help you identify where your users are most likely to look. Their heat map at https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html sums up the options pretty well:
5.3 Above The Fold
One general rule on the Internet is that people spend most of their time on a site “above the fold.” The first thing people do when they reach a website is to absorb as much information as possible before they start scrolling. The part of the page that they can see without scrolling is called “above the fold.” That’s where you want your ads. The number of links that appear above the fold affect how likely people are to click on your AdSense ads. That’s why more ads doesn't always mean more money! Google always puts the top-paying ads on the top and the lowest-paying ones at the bottom.
If you have a stack with three or more ads, the cheaper ads might steal attention away from high-paying ads and clutter up your website. You don’t want ads and links competing against each other. If you want to increase your earnings per click, remember: Less is More! And that’s particularly true above the fold.
5.4 Using Tables
I’ve already mentioned that one of the principles of a high click-through rate is to make your sites blend into the page. The more you position your sites to blend into the page, the better your click-through rate will be. One very neat way to help your ads blend into the site is to place them in tables. In the example below, Chris Pirillo again skillfully dropped his AdSense into a < table > for a clean and attractive look that turns AdSense into a new focal point.
5.5 Complementing Your Ads
Everything I’ve discussed so far has been about placing your ads where your users will be looking. That’s pretty easy. But there’s an alternative strategy, which can be very powerful: bringing your users to your ads.
You have to be careful here though. Google forbids you from saying to users “Look over here and click on the ads... I want the money.” And that’s reasonable. But with some clever design work, you can still guide your users to look in that direction.
The rule to remember here is that elements attract eyes. When a user loads a Web page, he’s always going to look at various things on the page, not just the text. That’s especially true of images, which is why one popular strategy was to place pictures related to the content of the ad right next to the ad unit. Google has now got wise to that. It’s changed its terms to forbid that practice specifically. Not surprisingly, when Google brought out that rule, it created a mild panic among publishers who rushed to change their page layouts. It didn’t help that Google doesn’t specify how far images should be from the ad units. The company just says that the images and the ads should not be lined up “in a way that suggests a relationship” between them. That’s vague enough to give Google plenty of latitude to ban publishers who think they’re doing nothing wrong. Fortunately, I haven’t heard of anyone being banned for failing to move their ads, and I suspect that you’d get a warning letter before any action was taken. So if you can’t put related images next to ads to draw attention to them, what can you do?
I’ve already talked about placing a text ad unit next to an image ad unit. That’s one strategy you could use.
You could also place an unrelated image next to an ad unit. Again, as long as there’s no suggestion of a relationship between the image and the ad unit, you’ll be safe.
For example, at SafetySurf.com, I put a link unit at the top of the page. It’s above the side bar, which is where many people put link units, but it’s also directly beneath the icon.
People are always going to look at the icon. When they look at the icon, they’ll see the ads.
There are all sorts of ways you can do this, but probably the best method is to first place your ads and then think about which images you can place near them.
Of course, you don’t just have to use images. You could also use a “Submit” button, a “next” link or anything else that users will have to look at on your page. A search box for example is an excellent spot. You know your users are about to look for something and click away. Why not offer them some of your own options. There’s a good chance that pulling your users’ eyes in this way will increase your click-through rates.

How To "Tweak" Your Ads To Make Them "Click"!

3.1 Ad Formats: “Dress” your ads for success!
How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles? Squares? What about borders and background colors? The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them- preferring to stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it’s like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar one. For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been making — just because I didn’t bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads. The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do you? Let me give you a few ‘ground rules’ that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my top-grossing pages:
3.2 Don't "Look" Like An Ad
People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content. If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders, that makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard to avoid them.
The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!
If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content.
Let’s begin by reviewing each of the different types of ad available from AdSense and explaining their uses... then I’ll introduce you to a few simple choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights.
3.3 Meet the AdSense Family
Google serves its ads in several flavors, with each of those flavors coming in a range of different shapes and sizes. It is very important to understand the differences between each of these ads. Some are ideal for particular locations. Some should never be used in certain locations. And some should be used very rarely—if at all.
The sample page at www.google.com/adsense/adformats lets you see all of the different kinds of ads at once. It even has links to sample placements that demonstrate how the ads can be used. For the most part, I’d recommend that you ignore those sample placements. I’ll talk about location in more detail later in the book, but for now just bear in mind that many of the ads in the samples are just too out of the way to be noticed. You can use them as a starting point if you want but you’ll save yourself a lot of time — and money — by taking advantage of the experience of myself and others, and following the recommendations here.
3.4 Text Ads — Google’s Finest
Text ads are probably the types of ad that you’re most familiar with. You get a box containing one or a number of ads with a linked headline, a brief
description and a URL. You also get the “Ads by Google” notice that appears on all AdSense ads. (Google changed this notice recently and it now blends in much better than it used to.) There are eight different types of text ad. The most popular is probably the leaderboard. At 728 x 90, it stretches pretty much across the screen and while it can be placed anywhere, it’s mostly used at the top of the page, above the main text.
That’s a great location. It’s the first thing the reader sees and it offers a good selection of ads to choose from. When you’re just starting out and still experimenting with the types of ads that work best with your users, it’s a pretty good default to begin with. Of course, you can put it in other places too. Putting a leaderboard ad between forum entries for example can be a pretty good strategy sometimes and definitely worth trying. On the whole though, I think you’ll probably find that one of the smaller ads, such as a banner or half-banner might blend in more there and bring better results. And I think you can often forget about putting a leaderboard at the bottom of the page, despite what Google’s samples show you. It would certainly fit there but you have to be certain that people are going to reach the bottom of the page, especially a long page. You might find that only a small minority of readers would get that far, so you’re already reducing the percentage of readers who would click through. Overall, I’d say that leaderboards are most effective blended into the top of the page beneath the navigation bar and sometimes placed between forum entries.
A banner or a half-banner would leave too much space on one side and make the ad stand out. It would look like you’ve set aside an area of the page for advertising instead of for content. That would alert the reader that that section of the page is one that they can just ignore. When you’re looking for an ad to put in the middle of the page though, a half-banner can be just the ticket. While a leaderboard will stretch over the sidebars of your site, just like the navigation bar, a 234 x 60 half-banner will fit neatly into the text space on most sites.
This sort of ad should be your default option for the end of articles and the bottom of blog entries. But for the most part, stay away from the 468 x 60 banner ad block! One of the first things people do when they sign up for AdSense is to grab a 468 x 60 ad block. Big mistake. I have a theory about why they do this. It’s the same theory that explains why the 468 x 60 block does not entice clicks. Most site owners have the mindset that when they put Google ads on their site, they must place the code that conforms most to traditional web advertising. And that would be...? Yup, the 468 x 60, the ubiquitous banner format that we have all come to know and love and... IGNORE. Everyone is familiar with the 468 x 60. And that’s exactly why the click-through rate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who use images on their banners. The 468 x 60 blocks screams, "Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever you do, DON'T click me. In fact, you should run from me as fast as you can!" In all but a few special cases, I have found the 468 x 60 ad block to be completely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitors do. Now, that doesn’t mean you can never use it. You just have to know what you’re doing and do it smartly. You have to do everything you can to make sure that that ad block looks absolutely nothing like a traditional banner ad. At my site, WorldVillage.com, I’ve done that by surrounding the ad with text. Because there’s no border around the unit, the ads blend into the text and look almost as they’re a part of the article. If I had left that unit in the middle of some empty space — at the top of the page for example — it would have looked exactly like the sort of banner that users have trained themselves to avoid. It wouldn’t have picked up any clicks at all. (Note, I could probably have used a half-banner here too but in general, I like to give my users as wide a choice of ads to click as possible.)
While this use of a 468 x 60 works for me — and it can work for you too if you blend it into the page properly — I’d stick to other formats, like the, half-banner if you’re not 100 percent sure that you can pull it off. When this ad unit fails, it can fail big. Google also offers six different kinds of rectangular ads: buttons (125 x 125), small rectangles (180 x 150), medium rectangles (300 x 250), large rectangles (336 x 280), and two sizes of squares 250 x 250 and 200 x 200. In fact, all of the rectangles can be slotted into the same spots on the page... with the exception of the button.
Probably the most common use of rectangles is at the beginning of articles. You can wrap the text around the ad, forcing the reader to look at it if he wants to read the article. That’s very effective. But you can really put these sorts of ads anywhere on the page. On my site, DealOfDay.com, I’ve put two rectangular ads right at the top of the page so that they take up the bulk of the space the user sees before he starts to scroll. That’s a very aggressive approach that might not work on every site. It’s worth trying though because if it works for you, you can find that it brings in great revenues.
3.5 Image Ads — Built To Be Ignored
Text ads should always be your first pick when you start to load up your site. Image ads should always be your last choice. A text ad offers many advantages over image ads:
A. With the right formatting, a text ad 'blends in' with your site content. An image ad will not give you the same freedom with its appearance, as the only thing you can play with is the size and positioning.
B. You can squeeze more text ads into the space that a conventional banner takes. People love to have more choices!
C. Properly formatted text ads don't look like clutter. Banners do!
D. People hate banners and avoid them at sight. Many tests confirm that people are much more receptive to text ads related with your content.
I just can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to take an image ad from Google. Text ads perform so much better, in my opinion, you’re better off sticking with those and ignoring image ads altogether.
3.6 Video Ads
There is however, one type of image ad that you should welcome on your website: Google’s video ads. These are an excellent addition to Google’s inventory and for sites that get them, they can bring very impressive returns. Instead of receiving the sort of static image that just gets ignored, you’ll receive the opening still of an online video. The video is stored on Google’s servers so your download times won’t be affected, and it only plays when the user clicks the Play button, minimizing distraction to the user. That’s a good thing. If a user’s eyes keep drifting to a moving image when he’s trying to read your content, he’s going to get pretty frustrated and not want to come back.
And it’s fine too if you’re being paid on a CPM basis; you won’t care then how often someone sees the video. But you’re not always paid on a CPM basis; you might also be paid on a CPC basis. Unlike Google’s other ad formats though, you won’t be paid for just one click. Users first have to click the Play button—which won’t pay you a dime—and then click either the screen while it’s playing or the link underneath the screen before you’ll earn money. In fact, you can’t even track the number of times the film is shown. (Although that does mean that you can watch the film yourself without getting rude messages from Google, and it also means that CPC advertisers are less likely to get free branding at the expense of your page space.) That extra step might sound like it’s going to hit your clickthrough rate for that ad unit but I’m not sure that’s true. As soon as someone sees a button anywhere, they want to click it. In fact, I’m sure that if you put a big notice next to the Play button saying, “DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON” you can be sure that your clicks would go through the roof. (But don’t try it; it’s unlikely that Google will appreciate it.) People will want to click that Play button, and many of them will want to learn more about the company that created the ad. And even if your CTR does drop for that unit, it’s likely that the click price for video ads will be higher than for other units competing for that space. Video ads are more expensive to create than text or image ads. That’s why they tend to be created by big companies like car giants or Disney. They might even be offering their television ads. If those corporations have gone to the trouble creating an original video ad or formatting a television ad for the Web, there’s a great chance that they’ll go to the trouble of outbidding their nearest rival for exposure.
If you’re getting a video ad, track how long it appears on that page and compare the revenues it brings with the days on which no video ad appeared. You should expect to see a spike in earnings. If you don’t see that spike, you can always opt out. Unlike text or image ads though, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a video ad. To qualify, you have to be opted in to receive image ads on an ad unit in one of these sizes:
● Medium Rectangle (300x250)
● Large Rectangle (336x280)
● Square (250x250)
● Small Square (200x200)
● Leaderboard (28x90)
● Skyscraper (120x600)
● Wide Skyscraper (160x600)
(It’s worth noting that with video ads, the bigger the format, the better the results). If you’re receiving those kinds of image ads and AdSense has a video ad to match your content, you might receive one. But what if you don’t? You’ll be receiving the sort of image ads that earn a poor clickthrough rate. That would cost you money. There are two things that you can do to minimize any losses from fishing for video ads and not getting them. The first is to stop fishing fast. If a week has gone by and your image ad unit hasn’t acquired a Play button, it’s probably not going to. So turn that image ad back into a text ad. The second is to follow the strategy I use at DealofDay.com. I’ve placed two rectangular ads at the top of the page to make them unmissable but one of them is an image ad. Google no longer allows publishers to place related images right next to ad units to draw attention to them but you can put an image ad next to a text ad. If that image ad becomes a video ad, you’re going to earn more money. If it stays an image ad, it’s going to pull eyes into your ad zone. This is about the only time I can think of when an image ad might be better than a text ad.
And when you do get video ads, there are also a couple of things that you can do to make the most of them... Adding video to your Web pages for example, is a breeze. There are millions of clips available for free use on the Web, and there’s nothing to stop you from shooting your own short. If your site regularly receives a video ad from AdSense, placing one or two more videos on those pages would help the ad blend into the site and increase clicks.
You could also encourage advertisers to build their own video ads specifically for your site. In Chapter 6, I talk about Google’s “Advertise on this site” feature and recommend that you make use of the landing page to help advertisers create effective ads for your site. You could also add a line or two there about video ads. Video ads are still fairly new on AdSense, but I’m really excited about them. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of them in the future and they’re going to really prove their worth.
3.7 Gadget Ads — Clever But Are They Effective?
I’m optimistic about video ads. I’m not sure yet about Gadget ads. These are rich media ads that might contain animation, Flash games and interactive content. At the moment advertisers are big brands like Coca-Cola and I suspect it’s likely to stay that way. Ads like these cost a lot more to design and program than a text ad, a graphic ad or even a home-made video ad. They can pay by impression or by click but I’m skeptical that you’ll get many clicks. An early test showed that only a third of one percent of viewers actually interacted with the ad. The problem is that they just look too much like ads. Most users have learnt to ignore them. If you do want to test them though, you’ll need to opt in to receive image ads. Apparently the most popular sizes for gadgets are rectangles, leaderboards and skyscrapers. Some ads might do well — such as those for movies or which have an attractive built-in game — but on the whole, I expect you’ll find that a well-blended text ad unit will do better.
3.8 Link Units — Great Little Stocking Fillers
An ad format that has already proved its worth, when used correctly, is link units. If you’ve ever bought Christmas presents for children, you’ve probably bought stocking fillers. You dole out hundreds of bucks on some state-of-the-art electronic gizmo, toss in a couple of toy cars that cost a dollar each just to fill up space and give the kid more to unwrap... then watch him spend 90 percent of his time playing with the car that cost 10 percent of your total gift budget. Ad Link units have the potential to be equally profitable. They’re very small, almost unnoticeable... but when used well, they can be extremely effective. Ad Link units let you place a box on your site that contains four or five links. They come in sizes ranging from 20 x 90 to 200 x 90, and are really meant to be placed on a sidebar. Because you can place both Ad Link units as well as other ad units on the page, you might find that the choice helps: if a user doesn’t spot something interesting in one type of ad block, he might spot it on another.
Where Ad Links differ from other types of ads is that they only display a list of topics that Google believes are relevant to the content of your pages. They don’t display the ads themselves. When a visitor clicks on a topic, Google pops up a new window with targeted ads. It can be argued that the Ad Links are ineffective because like video ads, people have to go through two clicks in order for you to get paid. That’s right, once again, you’re only getting paid for the second click (but that does mean you can check to see which ads your users are being served.)
But it can also be argued that if someone is taking the time to click on a topic, then they are probably very interested in the link, and are likely to click an actual advertisement on the resulting page. Some people have found that just about everyone who clicks on an Ad Link will click on the ads that appear on the next page.
I have tested Ad Links on multiple sites and have seen vast differences in results. That makes it more difficult to say whether or not they are for you.
In the first case, I placed the Ad Links on an information-based site with a very general audience. The results were nothing to write home about. Let's just say that you could just about buy a large candy bar with the CPM I saw. In the second case, I placed the Ad Links on a product specific site with a narrow audience. The results were fantastic! We're talking about a CPM that is greater than what someone might make flipping burgers in one day. The conclusions should be obvious. If you’re going to use an Ad Links unit campaign. You need to put them:
1. On a site with a specific field of interest. A general site will give you general ads — and few clicks.
2. Above the fold with few other links. For Ad Links, this is crucial: If your users are going to click a link, it should be a link that gives you money.
It’s also a good idea to keep your Ad Link units for sites with high-paying keywords. If someone comes to your site seeking out information or a product on a top-notch keyword, they tend to be more likely to click as a result. There are two kinds of link units: vertical units and horizontal units. Vertical link units are great slotted into sidebars. They just look like a natural extension of the link list. But horizontal link units can be at least as effective. Since they were introduced, they really have become an extremely useful tool. Some users have reported increases in CTR as high as 200 percent using these units! Instead of piling the links one on top of the other—which is great for putting above lists of links but stand out too clearly when placed in text—the horizontal ads blend in perfectly when placed on pages with articles.
You can still only use one Ad Link unit per page and users still have to click twice before you get paid but they’re definitely worth slipping into a long article. You probably shouldn’t put them at the bottom of a page where they’ll be very easy to miss, but there are plenty of other places where these sorts of ads can work very, very well. For example, a horizontal ad unit can be a great alternative to a leaderboard. It’s much more subtle and takes up less space on the page — definitely something to experiment with to see which of the two brings you the highest revenues. Or you could use them to separate forum or blog entries. As a horizontal unit, they can be very effective as frames that give people somewhere easy to go when they reach the end of a text unit.One great use for horizontal link units though is on directory pages. If you have a Web page that contains tables of links, slipping a horizontal link unit above or below them — or both — can make the ads look like a part of the directory. It almost makes you want to build a directory just to try it out!
Fig. 3.13 A horizontal link unit at the top of the page at BetaNews.com. Would a leaderboard have produced better revenues in that position? Again, something that can easily be tested.
3.9 Expanded Text Ads — Shrinking Control Or Expanded
Income? Take a look at the ad format samples on the AdSense site and you’ll see a bunch of squares and rectangles filled with ads. Most of those ad units will contain more than one ad. On those units that do contain just the one ad, like the button or the half-banner, the ad will fill the space neatly and look pretty subtle.
You might be surprised then to put a skyscraper or a leaderboard on your site and find just one giant ad, written in super-sized text.
All the effort you’ve put into picking the right ad for your site, testing to see which formats work best and calculating which will give you the most clicks will have gone right out of the window. You’ve prepared your site to serve multiple ads that look like content, and instead you’re handing out a single ad that just screams “Don’t click me!” This can happen sometimes, but it’s not a reason to panic. It might even be a reason to celebrate. There are two possible reasons that Google is sending you these expanded text ads. The first possible reason is that you’ve been keyword-targeted. Google keeps track of your results (just like you should be doing) and tries to serve up the number of ads for your page that will bring in the highest amount of income. That might be four ads in a unit. Or just the one. Frankly, I’m a touch skeptical that showing one ad is going to bring me more revenues than showing several. But I’m prepared to give AdSense the benefit of the doubt. If I see that Google is giving me one ad, I’ll compare the results for that one ad to the previous results that I’ve had serving multiple ads in the same unit. If I find that my revenues have dropped I can either block that ad using my filters or just ask AdSense not to give me any more single ads. But if I find that the expanded text ad is giving me more money, I might still be worried. I know that users are more likely to click ads that look like content. I also know that they prefer to have a choice of ads rather than just one option. If I’m getting more clicks then with just one ad, it could well be that I have been doing something wrong with that ad unit in the past. I would want to look at how well it’s been optimized and whether it’s in the right place to bring in the best income. It could well be that this single ad is a high-payer and works better with little competition. But it could also be that getting that one ad is a warning that something was wrong with the way you’ve laid out that ad unit on your site. You might want to try some different strategies to see if they’ll increase your revenues when the multiple ads come back. There is another possibility though. You might have been site-targeted.
This is a whole different ball game. It means that an advertiser has spotted your site and asked Google to run their ads on it on a pay-per-impression (CPM) basis. You’re no longer dealing with tempting people to click, so you don’t care how much your ad looks like an ad. In fact you might even want it to look like an ad, if that’s what will keep the advertiser happy. The most important point to bear in mind here is that you want to make sure that you’re not losing money. It might be very nice for the advertiser to have exclusive control over a particular spot on your page but if you can make more money serving CPC ads in that space, then you need to make sure that your site is working for you and not for the advertiser. Again, watch your stats for a week and see if the revenues you receive for your impressions are higher than those you receive for your clicks. Most publishers do find that ads that pay by CPM pay better, especially sites with high traffic rates. After all, you’re getting paid for every visitor who comes to your site rather than just those that click, so all you have to do to increase your revenue is increase your traffic. As long as each impression pays more than you’re paying for the traffic, you’re going to be making a profit. That should be easy to calculate. If you find the revenues are lower though, then you’ll want to boot that ad off and go back to serving conventional ads. You can do that by opting out of showing site-targeted ads (you’re automatically opted in). In general, the biggest problem with these sorts of campaigns is not lower revenues; it’s that you’ve got no idea how long they’re going to last, which makes it difficult for you to take advantage of them. If you knew, for example, that you were going to get paid per impression for the next two weeks, then you’d want to buy in as much traffic as possible for that period, provided that you were paying less than you were earning. And because you don’t care about CTR, You could also lay off the optimization and focus on making your site more attractive to users. But you can’t tell when your site is going to be used for a CPM campaign and you can’t tell how long it’s going to last either. That means there’s little point in making major changes to your optimization; you might have to rebuild it the next day.
The best strategy then when you spot a site-targeted ad on your site is to keep a close eye on the cash flows. Buy in more traffic if you can do it profitably but for the most part, just enjoy the extra income!
3.10 Seasons Greeting With Themed Units
There is one more type of ad unit that you can use on your site. You just can’t use it all the time. Every time a holiday rolls around, Google brings out new ad units with seasonal themes.
The designs themselves vary according to season and location (users in Europe, for example, won’t see Thanksgiving ads).
In general, I always say that your ads should be unobtrusive but I like these themed ads. They’re eye-catching without looking like banners. When it’s holiday-time, it’s always worth checking out the format page again and seeing what’s available. To sum up the different types of ad format then...
• Leaderboards are best at the top of the page;
• Squares and rectangles can be embedded into text itself;
• Vertical ads and buttons should slip down the side of the page;
• Vertical link units should be placed next to link lists;
• Horizontal link units can go at the top of the page, between blog entries or above and below directories;
• Image ads should rarely be used at all;
• Themed ads can be slotted in at holiday time;
• And Video ads should be used whenever possible.
Those are the general rules governing ad formats. They’re worth knowing because they’re a good place to start. They’re also worth knowing because you can’t break the rules until you know what they are... and that’s when the fun really begins!

Saturday, August 21, 2010

AdSense Making The Money!

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll be ready to start using — and profiting from — AdSense. I’m going to talk you right through the process of signing up to AdSense from reaching Google to being ready to place your first ad.If you’ve been putting off signing up until you get time to figure out how to do it, you’ve just run out of excuses!
2.1 What Is AdSense?
Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re signing up to. Many of the principles and strategies that I describe in this book make the most of the way that AdSense works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on those ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues. Unfortunately, I can’t really do that. Much of the way that Google runs the AdSense program is kept under wraps. I know a few things — and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads. But I don’t know it all. No one outside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit that site best, there’s a good chance that the Web would be filled with sites created specially to bring in the highest paying ads instead of sites built to bring in and inform users. People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less money than high quality sites that attract loyal users who click on ads. The fact is, we can make the most of both AdSense and our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites. That’s because AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level, AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. When you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and receive a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad). The ads themselves come from another Google service: AdWords. If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords. Advertisers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text — and here’s whereinteresting — they choose how much they want to pay.
Advertisers decide on the size of their advertising budgets and the amount they’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides where to put those ads. So a company that has a website selling handmade furniture might create an ad that looks like this:
The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his advertising budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month. But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that and put them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of that dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret. The New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 78.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’t been confirmed but it is around what most people in the industry expect that Google pays.) That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying. The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth. Neither of those things is true online. When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are going to turn up. When you sign up to AdSense, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page. You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click.
Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receive maximum revenues, and that advertisers get the best value for their money.
So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furnishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only ad that could appear on your page. There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks will give you the highest revenues. That might not be the ad with the highest possible click price though. If a lower paying ad gives you more clicks and higher overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead. In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price. In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportunity. You can influence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content and in terms of price. You can certainly influence the number of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that entirely up to you — and it’s a crucial part of the difference between earnings that pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars. In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and the end of turning your site into income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it needs to be the beginning. You’ll want to make sure you’re not getting low-paying ads, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the clicks that turn those ads into cash.
If you want an in-depth look at Google AdWords, I recommend Perry Marshall’s training materials.
2.2 Signing Up Made Easy
First though, you have to sign up. Here’s how you do it. The sign-up page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like. First, you’ll have to tell Google whether you want an “individual” account or a “company” account — whether you’re a company with more than twenty employees or practically a one-man show that’s just you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and they’ll be paid directly to you.
You’ll also be able to choose between three different ways of receiving your money: Electronic Funds Transfer, local currency check or Secured Express Delivery. In general, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit using the Electronic Funds Transfer; Google charges for express mail checks. (What you won’t be able to choose is whether you’re paid per click—on a “CPC” basis—or for every thousand times you show an ad—on a “CPM” basis. Google decides that for you. Some ads will be CPC and others will be CPM.)

The next piece of information that Google demands is your URL. There’s only room for one URL, which can be confusing if you have more than one site and want to put AdSense on all of them. Don’t worry about it. It won’t affect how you use AdSense at all, so just submit your biggest site for now. The next question is about whether you want content-based ads — the type of small text ads I’ve been discussing so far, search ads or both. (Content-based ads are better but I’ll tell you how to benefit from each so I recommend that you choose both.) Once you’re approved, you’ll just have to copy and paste a small piece of code into your website and you’re done!
2.3 Google Policies
AdSense works. I know it works because I’ve got the stats, the checks and the bank balance to prove it. And all of the methods that I used to increase my AdSense revenues were completely legitimate and in line with Google’s policies. That’s important. It is possible to cheat AdSense. But you’d have to be crazy to do it. You can make so much money working within Google’s rules that to risk getting thrown out by putting ads on pages without content or by persuading users to click on the ads is just plain crazy. I’ve put a detailed list of Google’s “do’s and don’ts” at the back of this book. The things to look out for in particular are: Code Modification You have to paste the AdSense code onto your site as is. And you don’t need to do anything else! Your AdSense account will let you play with colors and placements (and getting those right is what will really rocket your income) so why bother playing with Google’s HTML? It’s not necessary and it could get you a lifetime ban. Incentives When the ads appear on your page, you have to leave them completely alone. You might be tempted to tell your users to “click here” or support your sponsors but if Google catches you, they could well cut you off. They want people to click because they’re genuinely interested in the ad. Get your strategy right and they’ll do just that. You can encourage your users to download the products your referral buttons promote or to use your search bar, but never encourage your users to click your ads.
Content Google is pretty picky about where the ads are displayed. They don’t want advertisers complaining to them that their services were being promoted on a site that supports gambling or is filled with profanity or contains more ads than content. If your content doesn’t come up to scratch, you’ll need a site that does. Prohibited Clicks And nastiest of all are the people who either click on their own ads or create programs to do it for them. The bottom line is that you don’t need any of this stuff. Maximizing your revenue within the rules is a breeze!
2.4 As Easy as 1-2-3!
The bottom line is that there are three ways to increase your AdSense revenue.
1. By Tweaking the Ads to make them more appealing to your visitors;
2. By Optimizing your Website for better AdSense targeting (or what the Google folks call 'content relevance');
And the only sure-fire way to get 1 and 2 right is by
3. Tracking Visitor Response.
If you don't know what works (and what doesn't work) in trying to increase your AdSense revenue… you're shooting arrows in the dark! The right tracking tools can reveal a great deal about your visitors and answer fundamental questions such as what they're looking for and what makes them 'click'. Once you've figured that out, bingo! You're on your way to big AdSense bucks! But it isn't as straightforward as it seems. If it were, there wouldn't be so many grumpy people on AdSense forums, complaining about their low AdSense earnings. It's not that they aren't doing anything about it. They simply aren't doing the right things.
Let me assure you that in the time that I have been using AdSense, my earnings have only gone up — and so will yours, if you apply all my techniques seriously.

GETTING STARTED WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE

1.1 The Basics: Building Your Site
Since this book came out lots of people started asking me how they can make money with AdSense. I’m always happy to help people make the most of Google, but many of these people didn’t even have a website! Here’s the bad news: to make money with AdSense, you’ve got to have a website. There’s no getting around that. The good news though is that it’s never been easier to create a website from scratch and use it to generate real revenue.
I’m going to give a brief introduction here to creating a website from the ground up. You can find plenty more information online and I’ll tell you where to look. A good place to start is my own book How To Build Profitable Websites Fast, available at www.buildawebsitefast.com. If you already have a site up and running, you can just skip this bit, head down to 1.10 and begin reading about how to improve your AdSense revenues.
1.2 Naming Your Site
The first thing your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than done these days. All the best words in the dictionary have either already been bought and built by developers or they’ve been bought and offered by speculators.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a good name and buy it for a song. Putting two words together with a hyphen can work (like http://www.adsense-secrets.com) and there are plenty of good names available if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .net and .biz etc.
Your first stop should be www.DomainAnything.com. This is a nuts and bolts service that lets you hunt and buy names, order hosting plans and even submit your site to the search engines. When you’re looking for a name, you can just toss in ten options and the site will tell you which (if any) are available. Find a good one, and you can either buy it there or pick it up at www.godaddy.com (they can be a bit cheaper). All in, buying a name from one of these service won’t cost you more than about $9 a year. If you can’t find a name you like and that hasn’t already been grabbed, you can take a look at sites like www.moderndomains.com and www.bestnames.net. These are companies that buy domain names and sell them for a profit. There’s a good chance you’ll find some good names here but they can cost you anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with a penny, think about the advantage that a good name can bring and ask yourself if you can’t get the extra traffic a cheaper way. Often, you can.

1.3 Choosing A Hosting Service
Your site is going to be stored on a hosting company’s server. (You didn’t want thousands of people dialing into your computer every hour, did you?) Again, there are lots of different options available depending on how much you want to pay and what you need.
In general, you’ll want to make sure that you have about 50 megabytes of space (that’s enough for 100 pages!), full statistics reporting and most importantly, 24 hour service. If your site goes down, you’ll be losing money every hour it’s offline. If there’s a problem with the server, you want to make sure it’s fixed right away.
You get what you pay for with Web hosting. “Free” services will cost you more than you save in lost revenue, and you can pay up to $200 a month fordedicated servers. Twenty bucks a month is a reasonable price to pay and GoDaddy.com and NetworkSolutions.com both offer good programs.
1.4 Designing The Site
It used to be said that absolutely anyone could create a website. That was true: absolutely anyone who knew HTML. Today, you don’t even need to know that. Programs like Microsoft’s FrontPage or NVU (which is free; you can download it at www.nvu.com) let you create sites without you needing to know your tags from your tables. If you can use Word, you can create a website.
You can either have fun playing with the programs and designing the site yourself or you can hire a professional designer to do it for you.
Freelance sites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com are good places to advertise. You can invite designers to give you quotes and pick the best based on price and talent. Be sure to check feedback and portfolios though; a low bid is often low for a good reason.
1.5 Creating Content
In Chapter 11, I talk in detail about building content and optimizing what you write to attract traffic and maximize your AdSense revenues. There are all sorts of ways to do that but for the moment just bear in mind that the ads that appear on your site will depend on the content on your pages. That’s how AdSense works: users click on the ads because they’re relevant.
And that’s why it’s not worth putting up a site just to cash in on particular keywords. Google doesn’t like it and neither do users. If your site doesn’t genuinely interest your visitors, you’ll find it hard to get traffic, links and clicks on your ads.
But there are still a lot of different ways to create content very easily that improves your income. I’ll tell you all about them in Chapter 11.
It’s also worth remembering that Google doesn’t place ads on particular types of sites, so if you’re thinking of building a casino site stuffed with AdSense ads, you can forget about it; it’s not going to happen.
Before you build a site that contains any content that’s remotely controversial, check out the AdSense Terms of Service (TOS) to make sure that it’s allowed. It will tell whether your idea is sound or whether you need to think again.
1.6 Getting Started With Blogger.com...
Want to get up and running with AdSense really fast? One way is to open an account at Blogger.com. Blogger is like those old free websites that you could set up in a flash but which looked like they’d been cobbled together from bits of left-over graphics that no one else wanted. Except that the blog you create at Blogger.com is the real McCoy. It’s professional, it looks great… and it takes just seconds to put together. All you have to do is choose a name and title for your blog, take your pick of the good range of templates available and get writing. You don’t have to worry about coding or design work or images or anything else. If you change your mind about the way your blog looks, you can just pick a different template. All that’s left for you to do is write… and add AdSense. Even that’s been made easy for you. Blogger.com lets you apply for AdSense directly from its site. It even gives you a preview of where your ads will appear and how they will look. While you’re waiting for your approval, you can play with fonts and colors so that you’re all set up and ready to start earning. Of course, once you’ve done that, there are all sorts of ways to play with the layout and content. You can easily move the ads into the sidebar by clicking the Template tab and looking for the line that says: Just paste the AdSense code directly beneath it. But that’s certainly not all. In Chapter 11, I explain lots of different, advanced strategies that you can use to maximize your AdSense earnings on your blog. You should certainly use them but more important is that you make a start. With Blogger.com, you can do that in seconds. It’s a great way to get started, but you should think of it as blogging with training wheels. After a bit you’ll want to move to your own domain so you can really pick up speed!
1.7 ... Or Google’s Page Creator
But blogs aren’t for everyone. Although they’re now one of the easiest ways to get online, they have to be updated regularly and aren’t the best option for static content.
Fortunately Blogger isn’t the only way to get online fast. Google’s Page Creator makes building a website as simple as point, click and type.
Again, you get a template that you can edit freely, and you can also break into the HTML to paste the AdSense code. Check to see how it looks, publish, and all you’ll have to do next is let people know where you are. And that’s where the disadvantages of creating a website using a free tool like Page Creator kicks in. With a website created through Page Creator, Search Engine Optimization becomes difficult. Your URL will be [yourname].googlepages.com, which is about as catchy a ball of slush. It’s unlikely to get very far in search engines and when you try to spread it around, it will simply make you look unprofessional. Page Creator can be a useful place to get started but it’s really designed to help people like teachers display information to a closed audience. It’s not a good way to earn a lot of money. If you’re keen to get started though, if you have an audience already set up... or if you just want to see your stuff online fast — and with ads — then it’s a fun toy to play with. And you can always move your content onto your own URL when you’re ready.
1.8 Search Engine Optimization
However you decide to build your first site, people have to know you’re there. One of the most important ways to do that is get yourself a high-ranking in a search engine. There are lots of different search engines, but only three are really important: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In Chapter 21, I’ll talk in more detail about improving your search engine rankings.
If you want to take a shortcut, there are plenty of companies which will make the submissions for you and they’ll even optimize your site to get you as high on the rankings as possible.
1.9 Links
Your search engine ranking will depend on a number of factors. One of those factors is the number of sites that link to yours. As far as Google is concerned if lots of sites about model railways link to your model railway site, that must be a pretty good sign that people who like model railways think your site is good. So they’ll want to offer it to people who search for model railways, bringing you lots of free traffic.
Once you’ve got your site up and running you’ll want to persuade other sites to give you links. You could offer to exchange links and you could even set up a page that contains recommended links so that you’ll have somewhere to put them.
There’s a range of other strategies and services that you can use. You can find out about those in Chapter 20.